Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Get It First, But Get It Right

George McGovern's death this weekbrought to mind an unlikely incident from
election night in 1972, one that would tell me that I might be getting through
to at least some students. At the same time, it would offer me a teaching opportunity
that I missed that night but made good use of in the future.

I was an
assistant professor in the Marquette University College of Journalism in those
days, and I moonlighted as a reporter and news announcer for WISN. Too junior
to teach summer school courses, I had jumped at the chance to be a summer
replacement at the station when the news director, Don Froehlich, offered me
the opportunity a year or so earlier. That turned into weekend work, as well,
and stints covering special events like election nights

.

On election
night in 1972, Don gave me the keys to the news department car and sent me downtown
to report on the doings at the election night headquarters of the Democrats and
their presidential candidate, George McGovern. McGovern had long trailed in the
polls and was given no chance of winning, but how low he had sunk I did not know
until then. Headquarters was in the Wisconsin Hotel, on Third Street, just
north of Wisconsin Avenue.

Major candidates
for statewide office and for the presidency, or their representatives, normally
had suites in upscale hotels like the Schroeder Hotel, on the corner of Wisconsin
Avenue and Fifth Street and the elegant old Pfister, on the East Side at
Wisconsin and Jefferson Street. Their
supporters ate and drank and danced to live orchestras in the ballrooms. It was
my observation (“Lorenz’s Law, I was bold enough to call it) that those
candidates destined to win took up election night residence in the Pfister, and
that held through the years that I was reporting.

I had never
known a candidate’s headquarters to be at the Wisconsin. The hotel seemed to me
to be about half a star above those establishments that rented rooms by the
hour. Sailors going through boot camp at the Naval Station Great Lakes stayed there
when on liberty in Milwaukee. But that’s where the McGovern operatives had
settled.

When I walked
in, I spotted a telephone sign over an alcove off the lobby and I went over to
it. On a bench seat in the alcove were two of my students, also reporting for
radio stations that night. I greeted them and looked over at the pay telephones.
Both had “Out of Order” signs on them.

I asked the boys
if they knew where another telephone was.

“You can use one of these," one said
softly. "We put those signs on them to make sure we had a
phone when we needed one.”

The two of them
had taken my history of journalism course the year before, and they had heard
me lecture on the importance that reporters, over the years, had placed on
establishing communications.

I usually told the story of the excellent 19th
century reporter Henry Grady, who was in Tallahassee to report on the award of
the state’s disputed electoral votes in 1876. Before the decision was released,
Grady checked on telegraph service and found that the lines out of the city had been cut. He hired a
buckboard and driver and they drove until he found a telegraph office with
communication to the outside world. They returned to Tallahassee. When the
decision was handed down—Hayes would get the votes—Grady jumped into the
buckboard, and while the driver lashed
his horses to get full speed out of them, Grady sat alongside writing his
story. When they reached the telegraph office, his story was not quite ready,
so he gave the telegrapher a speller to send, thereby establishing his claim on
the line until he finished the story. (There was a side lesson there, of
course, on the reporter’s concern that he spell correctly

Later in the
course, I told my students stories about Merriman Smith, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning White House correspondent for United Press and its successor,
United Press International. In April, 1945, he was at President Franklin
Roosevelt’s Little White House at Warm Springs, Ga., when reporters were called
to the President’s cabin. Smith spotted a telephone next to a chair when he
entered the living room, and sensing something important was up—an end to the
war in Europe or, possibly, an announcement about the president’s health—he hid
the telephone behind the chair. When the press secretary announced FDR’s death,
the other reporters ran out to find telephones. Smith waited until they were
gone, retrieved the hidden phone and then called in his bulletin.

I also recounted
the story of Smith’s work on the day President Kennedy was assassinated. He was
riding the front seat of the wire service car in the presidential motorcade in Dallas and just happened to be talking on the car’s radiotelephone
to someone in UPI’s Dallas bureau when he heard
shots fired. He dictated the first bulletin, that three shots had been fired at
the motorcade, and gave what other details he could as the cars sped to
Parkland hospital. Jack Bell, the Associated Press correspondent, was
sitting in the back seat, and began to beat on Smith and
demand his turn with the phone. He raised welts on Smith's back, but the UPI man would not let go. When the press car
wheeled into the hospital’s emergency room entrance, Smith tossed the phone at Bell,
jumped out of the car and sprinted past the president’s limousine. He saw Mrs.
Kennedy’s roses lying in the president’s blood in the back seat and asked
Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who was standing near the car, the president’s
condition. “He’s dead,” Hill said. Smith sprinted into the hospital, found a
telephone at a nurse’s station and began dictating those details. Smith scored
a clear beat for UPI that day, partly out of luck, I said, but also because he knew
that it wasn't enough to get the story, it was crucial to get it out and
on the wire.

The students
sitting by those telephones had taken to heart the lesson of those stories, and I was proud of them. Years later, however, I also regularly taught a mass
communication ethics course, and I used them as an example of going over the
line in controlling communications. Grady using a speller to “own” the
telegraph line was one thing; their putting a bogus “Out of Order" sign on a
telephone was another. And my comment to those ethics students was that while I
would have given those two fellows an A for mastering the history lesson, had I
had them in ethics, I would have had to give them an F.

1 comment:

Wonderfully entertaining essay triggered by the passing of one of the old-school "good guy" politicians NOT beholden to lobbyists. I'm not glad that McGovern died, but I am glad you took the time to share your firsthand experience with his campaign in such a delightful way.

About Me

A. Louis Read Distinguished Professor of Mass Communication Emeritus, Loyola University New Orleans. For 30 years a member of the Loyola faculty, and at different times, founding dean, College of Social Sciences, and chair, Department of Communications.
Previously taught at Marquette University, New Mexico State University, & Southern Illinois University. UPI broadcast newsman, once upon a time. Since, WISN radio, Milwaukee; genial host on public affairs television, WMVS-TV, Milwaukee, and WYES-TV, New Orleans.
I take great pride in having been recognized for both professional and academic accomplishments with the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Press Club of New Orleans and Loyola University's Dux Academicus award for being "able to impart the knowledge and wisdom of the humanities, sciences or the professions to students in a manner consistent with the unique philosophy of Loyola University New Orleans as a Jesuit institution of higher education.”